"All hail, Commencement! when all classes free Throng learning's fount, from interest, taste, or glee; When sutlers plain in tents, like Jacob, dwell, Their goods distribute, and their purses swell; When tipplers cease on wretchedness to think, Those born to sell, as well as these to drink; When every day each merry Andrew clears More cash than useful men in many years; When men to business come, or come to rake, And modest women spurn at Pope's mistake.[08] "All hail, Commencement! when all colors join, To gamble, riot, quarrel, and purloin; When Afric's sooty sons, a race forlorn, Play, swear, and fight, like Christians freely born; And Indians bless our civilizing merit, And get dead drunk with truly _Christian spirit_; When heroes, skilled in pocket-picking sleights, Of equal property and equal rights, Of rights of man and woman, boldest friends, Believing means are sanctioned by their ends, Sequester part of Gripus' boundless store, While Gripus thanks god Plutus he has more; And needy poet, from this ill secure, Feeling his fob, cries, 'Blessed are the poor.'" On the same subject, the writer of Our Chronicle of '26, a satirical poem, versifies in the following manner:-- "Then comes Commencement Day, and Discord dire Strikes her confusion-string, and dust and noise Climb up the skies; ladies in thin attire, For 't is in August, and both men and boys, Are all abroad, in sunshine and in glee Making all heaven rattle with their revelry! "Ah! what a classic sight it is to see The black gowns flaunting in the sultry air, Boys big with literary sympathy, And all the glories of this great affair! More classic sounds!--within, the plaudit shout, While Punchinello's rabble echoes it without." To this the author appends a note, as follows:-- "The holiday extends to thousands of those who have no particular classical pretensions, further than can be recognized in a certain _penchant_ for such jubilees, contracted by attending them for years as hangers-on. On this devoted day these noisy do-nothings collect with mummers, monkeys, bears, and rope-dancers, and hold their revels just beneath the windows of the tabernacle where the literary triumph is enacting. 'Tum sæva sonare Verbera, tum stridor ferri tractæque catenæ.'" A writer in Buckingham's New England Magazine, Vol. III., 1832, in an article entitled "Harvard College Forty Years ago," thus describes the customs which then prevailed:--